Seeking Feedback on “ARC: Analysis of Raft Consensus”

My undergraduate dissertation “ARC: Analysis of Raft Consensus” will be submitted as a UCAM tech report. A draft is available here and I would be very grateful of any feedback.

Title: ARC: Analysis of Raft Consensus

Abstract:The Paxos algorithm, despite being synonymous with distributed consensus for a decade, is famously difficult to reason about and implement due to its non-intuitive approach and underspecification. In response, this project implemented and evaluated a framework for constructing fault-tolerant applications, utilising the recently proposed Raft algorithm for distributed consensus. Constructing a simulation framework for our implementation enabled us to evaluate the protocol on everything from understandability and efficiency to correctness and performance in diverse network environments. We propose a range of optimisations to the protocol and released to the community a testbed for developing further optimisations and investigating optimal protocol parameters for real-world deployments.

EDIT 1: Regarding the difference between this tech report and my dissertation. I have cut out material i didn’t believe would be of general interest, such as how i used VC or lessons learned. If you would like a copy of the original dissertation (probably because your a Part 2 student yourself), just email me and I’ll be happy to provide you a copy.

EDIT 3: A massive thankyou to everyone who has provided feedback and help to disseminate this draft (by retweeting it)

EDIT 4: The code is open source (MIT licence) and available on GitHub. I’ve not linked to as its currently undergoing a refactoring / documenting process ready for release of v0.1. My plan is split the code base into two separate libraries, one will be a event-based simulator for distributed system and the other will be a standalone Raft implementation. I’ll update this blog (& twitter) when the code is ready

EDIT 5: Wow. The response to this draft has been much greater than I expected (300+ downloads so far). Thank you so much to everyone in the community and of course Diego Ongaro. Diego’s Raft paper is online here and the Raft consensus site is here.